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In the nearly fifty years since beginning the book, 'The Art of Computer Programming', that has almost defined computer programming as much as it has defined him, Donald Knuth has received awards including the Kyoto Prize (1996), the Turing Award (1974), and the National Medal of Science (1979). He is an extraordinary man. As well as inventing 'Literate Programming' and writing the most important textbook on programming algorithms, he is also famous for designing and programming one of the most widely-used digital typesetting systems ever, even designing the fonts that went with it. He also pioneered the use of 'Open-source' software.

In my review of Get Lamp, the documentary about text adventures, I mentioned that the original Infocom employees believed the market for these games could exist for hundreds of years. After all, the novel is still around today and, despite stiff competition from movies and video games, writing fiction is still a profitable endeavor. Why not interactive fiction? The reality, however, is that since the demise of Infocom in 1989, many people have tried to make interactive fiction into a commercial endeavor. None have been able to figure out how to make the financial side work—until recently. Everything changed with the rise of smartphones and tablets.

You are reading a newsletter. There are links above you and below you...

“All the marketable software has already been written.” That sounds like a true enough statement. How am I going to make any money writing software when all the app ideas have been taken and the established software companies are already controlling the market? What software can I write that will allow me to earn a living? Of course I said this in 1982 when I was mainly doing contract development on Apple ][, CP/M, and the newly popular PC-DOS machines.

You don't even need a new idea. Just take an old idea and make it better.

Jon Masters summarises the goings-on in the Linux kernel community as the 3.9 kernel was being prepared for release. Ongoing development brings with it security headaches, and kernel testing is improved by the Trinity ‘Fuzzer’.

One of Game Developer's most popular features was our "Dirty Coding Tricks" bit from 2009, where we got devs to open up about some of the ugly hacks they've resorted to in order to make a ship deadline or pass certification. Well, we're back with nine new from-the-trenches stories, including a few unorthodox tricks from other dev disciplines besides programming. So read on, revel in your colleagues' ingenuity, and relax -- because you're not the only one that pulls out a dirty trick under pressure.

AOL has announced the debut of its latest online service --an RSS reader to replace the soon-to-be-defunct Google Reader. The new AOL Reader is a no-frills web app for reading your RSS feeds. There are no mobile apps, but the service does have a tablet-friendly layout for your on-the-go reading.

Google Reader goes away next week. How will you follow RSS feeds in the future?

"I think I'll stop here." This is how, on 23rd of June 1993, Andrew Wiles ended his series of lectures at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. The applause, so witnesses report, was thunderous: Wiles had just delivered a proof of a result that had haunted mathematicians for over 350 years: Fermat's last theorem. Wiles’ announcement now celebrates its twentieth birthday, but the result itself is linked to maths that is over 2000 years old.

Microsoft has added a new security option for those using its Windows Azure cloud service. Administrators can block unauthorized users from accessing virtual machines, Microsoft quietly announced at its TechEd conference in New Orleans earlier this month. The new option lets administrators put Access Control Lists (ACLs) on individual endpoints. By putting the ACLs on endpoints or subnets, administrators can control unauthorized access to virtual machines that are protected behind a firewall but are accessible in the public cloud.

The product grabbing the headlines is the new Nytro WarpDrive BFH8-3200, a product that for once lives up to the hype in it’s name. This is a full height PCIe3 8x flash storage card that has 3.2TB of usable space, 4.0TB of actual flash for those who want the numbers under the hood. LSI claims a 4.0GBps, not Gbps mind you, sustained throughput for performance, a fairly staggering amount.

I recently joked about RAM-as-storage. Well, jokes on me: here it is...

Friday Facebook announced the fix of a bug it said inadvertently exposed the private information of over six million users when Facebook's previously unknown shadow profiles accidentally merged with user accounts in data history record requests. According to Reuters, the data leak spanned a year beginning in 2012.

Now there's actual large infrastructure to support developers who want to create and publish their Linux games without having to deal with the usual lack of central standard authority themselves. Considering the direction Windows is going, this whole Linux game development thing doesn't seem so pointless after all. Having a multi-platform engine also has the advantage of being able to run games on special and portable devices that have become popular. You can easily adapt your engine to fit more devices when you use libraries that already have multiple versions (like SDL, OpenGL, etc.). It becomes easy to target even niche devices like the Raspberry Pi.

What is the best way to learn JavaScript? If you haven’t programmed before, you first have learn what programming is. If you are a programmer, though, you can take a shortcut: You already know many programming language constructs and just need to learn how they are expressed in JavaScript. Assuming that you are a programmer, the goal of this blog post is to get you started with JavaScript as quickly as possible. It describes the smallest subset of the language that allows you to be productive.

The Facade pattern is a common software design pattern used to create a simple unified interface for a set of interfaces in a system. The Facade interface is a higher-level interface that allows easier control of a set of subsystem interfaces without affecting the subsystem interfaces. Today I'll demonstrate how to implement the Facade pattern in the .NET Framework.

Eric Vogel takes you behind the scenes to see how the Facade is constructed.

If you work with C#, you have already mixed object-oriented code with some aspects of functional programming. Why not master Scala? Scala usage in enterprise applications is growing faster than the number of available developers, so there is an increasing demand for .NET developers to learn Scala — using existing C#, VB.NET, LINQ, and F# knowledge as a foundation. In this first article in a series dedicated to Scala for C# developers, I provide an introduction to Scala and its most popular IDE. It is aimed at those who spend their days with Visual Studio, but are interested in learning the increasingly popular JVM language.

Elixir is a functional programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. It has a Ruby-like syntax, and features protocols (for extending modules without changing their source), macros, and very good metaprogramming support. It has the benefit of learning from other languages’ experiences, too, so it has many modern features. For example, protocols and macros are lexically scoped, so metaprogramming no longer risks messing up the global execution environment.

It's fully compatible with existing Erlang code. So you've got that going for you, which is nice.

The other day I wrote about some principles that programming in Clojure makes very clear. Those principles could be applied just as well in Java, and often are. However, there are some things that make Clojure distinct. Three of those distinctions are the way it deals with state change (using an STM), the Persistent Data Structures, and the literal syntax for data with a reader (now called edn). Diving into the source code for Clojure, I realized that these three bits were written in Java. And that means that they can be used from Java.

If I could be remembered for just one thing, I’d want it to be this, because this is what designers and companies need to know and understand about the nature of user experience as a profession, a goal, an idea. And it’s taken me 13 years to be able to say it in exactly this way. Following is my list of 13 beliefs on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers, one for every year I’d been in the web industry at the time I wrote it.